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This section was my workspace for philosophy essays between July 2006 and April 2008.
I call this "Prehistoric Kilroy" because it gave me practice for more
disciplined essays in Kilroy Cafe.Also see my philophical blog and Twitter feed.

Issue #33, 11/26/2006

The Nature of Desire

By Glenn CampbellFamily Court Philosopher

Imagine a nice slice of chocolate cake. I don't mean the
store-bought kind but the perfect homemade
melt-in-your-mouth chocolate cake that you have only tasted
once or twice in your life.

Now that I have mentioned it, don't you want some? The lust
you may feel right now for chocolate cake is called "desire,"
and it is a quest that is essentially unfulfillable.

You can travel the world in search of the perfect chocolate
cake, but what happens when you actually find it? The first
bite is satisfying, but not exactly orgasmic. Your
immediate sensation is one of release. "At last, I have
found it!" Your second bite is good, but not as good as the
first. The third bite is routine, and by the fourth, fifth
and sixth bites, you don't really care anymore. You're just
eating the cake because it is there and you feel compelled
to finish what you have started.

If you eat too many slices of this perfect chocolate cake,
you might start feeling ill. All that sin, without
moderation, doesn't feel very good.

The experience of actually obtaining the thing you have long
desired can be a bit disconcerting. Here you have travelled
the world to achieve your goal, but now that you have it,
it's like, "So what?" You pace around for a while,
intellectualizing what a great chocolate cake it was, but
then, with nothing else to do, you can only pack your bags
and go home.

Our lust for chocolate cake illustrates the essential
problem of all forms of human desire. The drive can be huge,
but the reward, once you actually achieve it, usually feels
relatively modest, even routine and disappointing. Mostly
what you get when you reach the goal is a release from the
drive. This isn't necessarily a pleasant feeling, especially
if you have built your life around the quest. "What do I do
now?" you say to yourself.

Sexual desire is similar. When you see the perfect
specimen of the opposite sex (or the same sex, but let's not
complicate things), then your heart (or loins) are filled
with desire. You feel drawn to approach and touch the
subject, but what happens when you actually have your way with
him or her? There is a bunch of feverish activity, then a
release, and you no longer feel the same desire. The
pectorals don't excite anymore, and the breasts become lumps
of fat once again, not sexual objects.

With sex, there is a physical orgasm that you don't get with
chocolate cake, but even this is fairly limited and becomes
routine after you have experienced it a few times. It's not
the heavens bursting asunder or anything. It's just a
little rush, a drug-like high that lasts for a moment then
is gone.

"Is that all there is?" you say to yourself.

Yup, that's the fact. No desire is truly fulfillable.
Whatever it is you want—a million dollars, worldwide
fame, true love, unlimited access to the Playboy
mansion—once you achieve the goal, it is going to seem
routine and ordinary. Your success may even become
distressing to you, because your motivation is now gone and
your raison d'etre has vanished.

This "conundrum of desire" provides a hint as to why
relationships fail. The urge to merge can be huge, but once
you achieve all the things you desired, you inevitably find
that they don't live up to your fantasies. Okay, you have
unlimited sexual access, but it's like having unlimited
access to chocolate cake. Over time, it's just not going to
taste the same or have the same attraction to you.

That's when the problems begin. Having achieved everything
you hoped for, it is alarming to discover that all of your
problems and longings aren't solved. Your original lusts
may have been satiated, but what do you do now?

Sometimes, you blame your partner. "Why can't you deliver
satisfaction to me?" Maybe you start looking over the fence
to other potential partners. "If only I had that one, I'd
feel better now." Or maybe you start pinning all your hopes
on "the next step," whatever that may be—marriage, a baby, a
promotion, more fame, a bigger house, etc.—assuming that
this must be the missing piece to your elusive happiness.

You can also intellectualize and rationalize the object you
quested for. If your real lust for chocolate cake has faded,
then you might replace it with verbal slogans ("Chocolate
cake is the best dessert, rah, rah!") or maybe with a
systematized method for evaluating chocolate cake. Do wine
connoisseurs really have the same lust for the product as
they had in the beginning? No, they break down the taste in
intellectual terms (bouquet, body, etc.) and stop
experiencing the true desire.

Later slices of chocolate cake—the same one made
by the same cook from the same recipe—can never live
up to your early experiences. This is a simple fact of life
and of the human nervous system, which adjusts quickly to
each new stimulus. You can travel the world to reproduce
that original sensation, but you are probably never going to
find it. Maybe, you can find the exact same cake, but it
won't bring back the same euphoria, which was tied in part
to its novelty.

Relationships fail when there is nothing else to support
them beyond the initial desire. There are all sorts of
delusional systems you can construct for yourself to try to
justify and glorify the relationship after it is begun, but
the original motivating forces are inherently unsustainable.
The relationship itself will also be unsustainable without a
rapid and effective shifting of goals. In a land of
chocolate cake, chocolate cake quickly becomes irrelevant.
Something else must sustain the relationship.

After living with someone for a while, you realize that they
are a deluded, inherently gender-less soul just like you.
Their body becomes irrelevant and so do all the symbols of
romance. You are probably never going to reignite the
original passion, no matter how much you spend on roses or
candlelit dinners. Who you end up living with is another
routine sibling, like the annoying little brother you grew
up with.

That's not to say that siblings can't be close and deeply
meaningful to each other. Romance gives us permission to be
a lot closer to each other than real siblings normally are,
but there still have to be boundaries. There are times when
you want to be away from that irritating little twit, no
matter how much you may love him.

Siblings don't have any particular desire between them.
They are drawn together, instead, by their shared experience
and their common language. Couples tend to develop this as
well, provided there was any real communication between them
to begin with.

Desire is, by its nature, unfulfillable and unsustainable,
but life marches on, shaped in part by our earlier desires,
acted upon but now long past. If our early lust for
chocolate cake leads us to a career in bakery product
manufacturing and distribution, so be it. We are all suckers
for lust, and once we have made a decision based on that
delusion, we often have to live with it.

It is just something we need to be aware of in our future
decisions: Desire is fleeting. It can't be satisfying in
itself. You have to find something deeper.